Govt working on launch of private railway traction - PM

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The Ukrainian government is pleased with the results of deregulation in the sphere of freight wagons and plans to introduce deregulation in the sphere of railway traction to allow private traction to work at Ukrzaliznytsia's tracks, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman has said.

"There is one more issue. It is a similar deregulation that we did with wagons and now for the rolling stock to make an opportunity of launching private traction," he said in the Verkhovna Rada last week.

The prime minister said that as a result of deregulation of wagons, conditions for the use of private wagons and wagons belonging to Ukrzaliznytsia were equalized, whereas earlier the cost of using Ukrzaliznytsia's wagons was artificially understated, which caused losses to the enterprise, corruption and impeded the development of private wagons.

According to him, this year more than 10,000 cars will be built.

At the same time, Groysman pointed out the need to follow the principle of "do no harm" in the issue of deregulation of traction.

"We are currently working on this, so that we can leave the infrastructural component in the tariff so that Ukrzaliznytsia can maintain the tracks, energy system and build new ones, while the traction rolling stock would move wagons, so to speak, for its cost of carrying. This is our task now," the head of government said.